"He maketh small the
drops of water; they pour down rain according to the vapor thereof,
which the clouds do drop and distill upon man abundantly. Also, can any
understand the spreadings of the clouds, or the noise of his
tabernacles?"[242] The cause of this rarefaction of _cold water_ is as
much a mystery to the British Association as it was to Elihu; and even
were all the mysteries of the electrical tension of vapors disclosed,
"the balancings of the clouds" would only be more clearly discovered to
be, as the Bible declares, "the wonderful works of Him who is perfect in
wisdom." But the gravity of the atmosphere, the comparative density of
floating water, and its increased density by discharges of electricity,
were as well known to Job and his friends as they are to the wisest of
our modern philosophers. "He looketh to the ends of the earth, and seeth
under the whole heaven, _to make weight to air, and regulate waters by
measure, in his making a law for the rain, and a path for the lightning
of thunder_."[243] Three thousand years before the theory of the trade
winds was demonstrated, or before Maury had discovered the rotation and
revolutions of the wind-currents, it was written in the Bible, "The wind
goeth toward the south, and turneth about to the north. _And the wind
returneth again, according to his circuits._"[244]

Thousands of years before Newton, Galileo, and Copernicus were born,
Isaiah was writing about the "orbit of the earth," and its
insignificance in the eyes of the Creator of the host of heaven.[245]
Job was conversing with his friends on the inclination of its axis, and
its equilibrium in space: "He spreadeth out the north over the empty
space, and hangeth the earth upon nothing."[246]

So far from entertaining the least idea of the waters of the atmosphere
being contained either on the outside or the inside of a metal or solid
hemisphere, the writers of the Bible never once use, even figuratively,
any expression conveying it. On the contrary, the well-known scriptural
figures for the fountains of the rain, are the soft, elastic, leathern
waterskins of the east, "the bottles of the clouds," or the wide,
flowing shawl or upper garment wherein the people of the east are
accustomed to tie up loose, scattering substances.[247] "He bindeth up
the waters in his thick cloud, and the cloud is not rent under them."
"Who hath bound the waters in a garment;" "As a vesture thou shalt
change them;" or the loose,